Written as we finished up our 2022 trip to Poland last summer.

Happiness is the longing for repetition writes Milan Kudera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 

The Sunday sky is an almost-uniform gray with only a few spots where the cloud cover is even heavier, making patches of darker gray. Gray on gray on gray. The location of the sun is a mystery: so thick is the cloud cover that the sky’s luminance is completely uniform. Temperatures hover in the mid- to high-50s, and rain comes and goes throughout the day. There is nothing to do but sit in the house and read or watch television. Perhaps a game of cards to break the monotony. 

Happiness is the longing for repetition writes Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and even this gray, cold Sunday afternoon, our last day in Jablonka during this trip to Poland, has echoes of the joy of repetition. How many Sundays when I lived here passed just like this? Looking at the sky, looking at the puddles to see if it’s still raining, not entirely sure what I’ll do if it does stop raining. The pacing from the chair to the window. The thought that even if I were in a more urban area that I might not go out anyway. So the day has a certain melancholy satisfaction in the repetition of routines I haven’t followed in years in the land so owns my heart yet is not my own.

Our trips back to Poland are all about finding that joy in repetition. How many times do we try, in some little way, to relive those years of our life in Poland while visiting here? This visit was somewhat different — a trip to the Three Crowns Mountains, a hike up Babia, bowling in Zubrzyca — but it still had the same general shape. We visit the same people (that of course is to be expected), but we also do so many of the same things. Part of it is an effort to show our kids what we love about this part of the world; part of it, I think, is a little grasp at that joyful repetition Kundera speaks of.

And so as the day turns into night and the Boy crawls into bed here one last time during this trip, I find myself both relieved and melancholy as does he. “My last night in this bed,” he says with mixture of relief and sadness. As always happens during extended stays from home, we’re both ready to head back and return to our normal routines. But endings are always hard, always a bit gray like today’s sky. We know how incredible a given experience was; we know how much we’d like to repeat it (or at least the joy); we’re not sure when or even if we’ll repeat it. I think that’s the heart of the gray shade of endings: it’s that uncertainty about the Kunderan joy. 

I know well the emotions the Boy is going through: I felt them myself whenever something wonderful ended. The most wonderful thing for me then was the Feast of Tabernacles, an annual conference our sect held every fall as commanded by various passages in the Old Testament. It was not very much like the Biblical version: ours was more like a wonderful week-long vacation with seemingly endless money (the sect required a second 10% tithe of its members to pay for this week). Every year on that last night, I would lie in bed wondering if anything could be as wonderful as the week we just finished. Without even knowing it, I was searching for my own Kunderan joy of repetition and was haunted with the fear that it might never repeat – not in the same way, at least. 

This is also why, I think, I’m so enamored with nostalgia: the song that brings back memories of throwing a frisbee in the heat of summer, or the bit of perfume that recalls of a long-forgotten adolescent love, or the taste of potatoes with dill that takes one back to summers in Poland. Those moments will never repeat, and in that melancholy is a certain joy, I think. It’s the longing for repetition that brings joy, after all. If the repetition comes, that’s wonderful, but it rarely does, even when coming back to Poland regularly to visit old friends and walk old paths.

The trick then, I guess, is to treat even days like today with that same approach: reliving the past, entering a kind of Kunderan happiness even in the gray reality of a cold, rainy Sunday afternoon. To relive that melancholy in a strange kind of joy, the happiness of repetition.